On first start-up, the game will ask if you want to participate
in our automated survey. You have to opt-in, and can easily opt-out
(via the Options) at any time.
When opt-in, whenever you exit a game, a JSON blob will be send
to the survey server hosted by OpenTTD. This JSON blob contains
information that gives a global picture of the game just played:
- What settings were used
- How many humans vs AIs
- How long the game has been played
- Basic information about the OS / CPU
All this information is kept very generic, so there is no
chance we send private information to our survey server.
Nothing in the JSON blob could identify you as a person; it
mostly tells about the game played. At any time you can see
what the JSON blob includes, by pressing the "Preview Survey
Results" button in-game.
Progress bars are drawn differently depending on when it was added, with
different layouts and sizes.
This change adds a standard padding size to use, and makes all progress
bars visually similar, with scaled padding.
Nobody really paid attention to the lobby window, and it completely
missed its purpose. Most people don't even wait for companies to
show up, but just hit "New Company".
This in turn means people create a lot of unneeded companies, while
they "just want to watch the game" or join another company.
Instead, "Join Game" now just joins the game as spectators.
Soon we will make "join game" join the game as spectator first,
so limiting the amount of spectators makes no sense anymore in
that context. Not sure it ever did make sense.
TURN is a last resort, used only if all other methods failed.
TURN is a relay approach to connect client and server together, where
openttd.org (by default) is the middleman.
It is very unlikely either the client or server cannot connect to
the STUN server, as they are both already connected to the Game
Coordinator. But in the odd case it does fail, estabilishing the
connection fails without any further possibility to recover.
This removes the need to know a server IP to join it. Invite codes
are small (~7 characters) indentifiers for servers, which can be
exchanged with other players to join the servers.
The GUI now more clearly shows some basic information about the
server you joined, your client name (and the ability to change it),
and what players are in which company.
It also contains useful buttons to press to join companies, chat
with other people, and for admins to kick/ban people.
Additionally, renamed "advertised" to "visibility"; this has to
do with future additions, but also because it is more clear in
wording.
The original idea was that people could find a server they could
talk in their native language on. This isn't really used in that
way. There are several reasons for removing this:
- the client also sends his "language" to the server, but nothing
is doing anything with this.
- flags are a bad way to represent languages, and over the years
we had several (rightfully) complaints about this.
- most servers have their language set to "All", and prefix the
servername with the language it is about. This is a much more
efficient way to do the same.
All in all, this feature should go back to the drawing board.
Maybe it could work in another form, but this form is not it.
Rubidium